UNCENSORED WISDOM FROM DIVERSE SENIOR LEADERS

A huge group of world leaders representing an astonishing pool of talent,
accomplishment and distinction recently signed a two-page newspaper ad that
preached a shocking civic apostasy.

If they had come out for a flat Earth, their view could not have been more
at variance with what passes as public policy and conventional wisdom in
nearly every advanced nation.

By putting their names down, all of them have committed a sin that in
today's political world would disqualify them from any position requiring
confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Yet Americans in the group included both
incurable Republicans and hopeless Democrats, people who have served in the
nation's Cabinet and its Congress, Nobel Prize winners, some sitting
federal judges, an Episcopal bishop, the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist
Church, a retired network anchorman of legend, the director of the American
Civil Liberties Union and a deeply conservative economist whose worship of
capitalism is so devout he was able to find models to admire in Pinochet' S
Chile and the white oligarchies of South Africa and Rhodesia. I mean, these
were people you could never have to dinner, at least on the same evening.

It made me search my mind for what it was they had most in common.

Many were tenured professors or lifetime jurists safe from political harm.
Some, like Laurance Rockefeller, were so rich they don't have to give a
damn what people think.

But what characterized them more than anything was their age. The group's
average must have been above 70.

This may have been a stronger message than the cause they rallied around,
which was that the war on drugs - a war that political leaders have been
declaring and losing for the better part of this century is doing more harm
than good. That's for another argument.

What's more important is that these people are a mirror of what the
American voting public is going to be more like in the next century as the
population ages. Does this mean we face a rebirth of liberalism? Maybe not.
I can't see Milton Friedman or George Shultz, two of the signers, ever
doing a complete Barry Goldwater even if I have hope than Alan Cranston,
another signer, will yet write a book confessing that, on balance, he found
conservatives more disgusting than liberals.

Still, liberals can dream when they see Strom Thurmond, who once ran for
president on the promise to keep Southern blacks from using white toilets
and drinking fountains, and who - while he didn't sign the ad - now has
professional black people on his nonjanitorial staff.

And, of course, Goldwater's slippage into an old age of liberalism was
gratifying even if many of his so-called friends malignly ascribed this to
the influence of his younger second wife.

Maybe we will live to see Trent Lott championing homosexuals in the
military, Newt Gingrich in a rocking chair confessing his entire
speakership was just one of his childish pranks like the times he used to
frighten maiden aunts with snakes.

And what of Bill Clinton? Forget the tasteless sex jokes.

I see his redemption as head of a foundation that opposes the death penalty
and promotes reform of welfare reform, with Joycelyn Elders and Lani
Guinier (two more signers) on his board of directors.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)